“I!” exclaimed her brother, hastily, as if anxious to retract an error; “I said it then, and I say it now and so you will find it to be. The Tetons are in our neighbourhood, and happy will it prove for the boy if he is well shut of them.”
“It seems to me,” said Dr. Battius, speaking with the sort of deliberation and dignity one is apt to use after having thoroughly ripened his opinions by sufficient reflection,—“it seems to me, a man but little skilled in the signs and tokens of Indian warfare, especially as practised in these remote plains, but one, who I may say without vanity has some insight into the mysteries of nature,—it seems, then, to me, thus humbly qualified, that when doubts exist in a matter of moment, it would always be the wisest course to appease them.”
“No more of your doctoring for me!” cried the grum Esther; “no more of your quiddities in a healthy family, say I! Here was I doing well, only a little out of sorts with over instructing the young, and you dos’d me with a drug that hangs about my tongue, like a pound weight on a humming-bird’s wing!”
“Is the medicine out?” drily demanded Ishmael: “it must be a rare dose that gives a heavy feel to the tongue of old Eester!”
“Friend,” continued the Doctor, waving his hand for the angry wife to maintain the peace, “that it cannot perform all that is said of it, the very charge of good Mrs. Bush is a sufficient proof. But to speak of the absent Asa. There is doubt as to his fate, and there is a proposition to solve it. Now, in the natural sciences truth is always a desideratum; and I confess it would seem to be equally so in the present case of domestic uncertainty, which may be called a vacuum where according to the laws of physic, there should exist some pretty palpable proofs of materiality.”
“Don’t mind him, don’t mind him,” cried Esther, observing that the rest of his auditors listened with an attention which might proceed, equally, from acquiescence in his proposal or ignorance of its meaning. “There is a drug in every word he utters.”
“Dr. Battius wishes to say,” Ellen modestly interposed, “that as some of us think Asa is in danger, and some think otherwise, the whole family might pass an hour or two in looking for him.”
“Does he?” interrupted the woman; “then Dr. Battius has more sense in him than I believed! She is right, Ishmael; and what she says, shall be done. I will shoulder a rifle myself; and woe betide the red-skin that crosses my path! I have pulled a trigger before to-day; ay, and heard an Indian yell, too, to my sorrow.”
The spirit of Esther diffused itself, like the stimulus which attends a war-cry, among her sons. They arose in a body, and declared their determination to second so bold a resolution. Ishmael prudently yielded to an impulse he could not resist, and in a few minutes the woman appeared, shouldering her arms, prepared to lead forth, in person, such of her descendants as chose to follow.
“Let them stay with the children that please,” she said, “and them follow me, who ar’ not chicken-hearted!”